At Çatalhöyük, Turkey, Stanford-led team finds an 8,000-year-old statuette and clues to how societies evolve
She’s stately – more than half as wide as she is tall.
She’s rendered with “a good and pragmatic knowledge of the human body,” according to the Stanford-led archaeologists who found the two-pound statuette in Turkey at the ancient settlement of Çatalhöyük.
And she’s beautifully formed of white limestone, indicating that she may have been a status symbol among the people who produced her 8,000 years ago.
Like other finds at Çatalhöyük, a Neolithic site where Stanford Professor Ian Hodder has led excavations since 1993, the portly female figurine unearthed at an ancient house in summer 2016 offers tantalizing clues to how human societies evolve.
Çatalhöyük is a large and complex site. More than a dozen layers of ruins date from 7500 BCE to around 5700 BCE, when the site was abandoned. It has yielded some of the oldest known fabric and some of the first evidence of domesticated plants and animals.
Conventionally associated with fertility goddesses, the figurine found there may also represent an elderly woman who had risen to prominence in Çatalhöyük’s egalitarian society.
It is noteworthy not for its shape – many such figurines have been found at Çatalhöyük and other Neolithic sites throughout southeastern Europe, Turkey and the Middle East – but for its craftsmanship. Most such figures are more crudely rendered and are made of clay. It would have taken a practiced artisan with specialized tools to render such gravitas in a figure less than seven inches tall.
To Hodder, the figure’s shift in quality, as well as the context in which it was found, may signal Çatalhöyük’s evolution from a shared to a specialized economy – with potential for economic inequality.
“We think society was changing at this time, becoming relatively less egalitarian, with houses being more independent and more based on agricultural production,” Hodder told the Stanford News Service.
The figurine hints that society may have been changing in another way – in how it buried its dead.
Previous generations had buried human remains between levels in houses, with platforms connecting the living above and dead below.
“In these latest levels of Çatalhöyük, burial of humans in the houses stops,” said Hodder. He surmises that “perhaps these figurines are replacements for that idea.”
Hodder calls Çatalhöyük “like an endless crossword puzzle.”
“Trying to make sense of it. I still feel a tingle in my feet as I go over Çatalhöyük,” he told Stanford Magazine in 2014.
“As long as I can keep that going, for me, that is success.”
Browse finds and features from Çatalhöyük on Stanford’s pilot web application.
Learn more about archaeology at Stanford.